Archive for the ‘Acura’ tag

Faithful Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car readers should now be receiving their copies of the November issue (#111), which includes a special “High Mileage Heroes” feature on a unique second-generation Acura Legend Coupe that reached a notable mileage milestone that was celebrated very much in the public eye.

Then-21-year-old Tyson Hugie purchased this top-of-the-line ’94 Coupe LS from its original owner, Patricia, in 2003, flying from his Utah home to San Jose, California, with cash in hand. The car had 95,000 miles on the odometer, a full book of maintenance service records and was in excellent condition, save for worn leather on the driver’s seat. It is one of 27 six-speed manual LS Coupes in the Desert Mist Metallic over taupe combination built for that model year. That initial road trip back to Utah would set the stage for countless such experiences that the car and owner would share.

A college student working part-time when he bought the Legend, Tyson had a natural spirit of adventure and a passion for road trips and seeing the country. He began traveling all over, and for nine years, he averaged 45,000 miles a year.

This Coupe is powered by what Acura termed the “Type II” engine, the upgraded SOHC, 24-valve V-6 making 230 hp and 206-lb.ft. of torque.

Backing up that engine is the aforementioned six-speed manual, which features overdrive on fourth, fifth and sixth gears and shifts with typical Honda precision- and still present is its factory-installed clutch (hanging on by a thread, Tyson admits…)!

As the flagship of the Legend line, this car featured high-end amenities like soft-close power door latches, automatic front seat belt presenters and -following the lead of the classic first-generation Legend Coupe– power-retractable rear quarter windows.

While Tyson experimented with bolt-ons like larger alloy wheels and clear corner markers for a time — and eventually had the car’s aged factory leather replaced with two-tone Katzkin — the factory-recommended maintenance schedule was something he followed religiously, insisting on 91 octane fuel at every fill-up and 5W30 oil changes every 3,000 miles. Even taking out two suicidal deer — on the way to a 2007 regional Acura Legend meet in Texas, an accident that cost between $6,000-$8,000 to repair on the then-299,000-mile car — wasn’t enough to put this Coupe out of commission.

Indeed, it only left him stranded once, at 399,750 miles, when the original fuel pump died a mile from his home. He continued Patricia’s detailed record-keeping, and thanks to a spreadsheet, he can tell you exactly how many fluid changes, brake pads, windshields, tires, timing belts and other replacement components it’s received.

Tyson had been active in the Honda/Acura online forum community for some time, and had been encouraged to share his road trip stories and photos. As this Legend crested 467,000 miles, his friends suggested he start blogging about reaching the 500,000-mile milestone. On March 21, 2011, Tyson created the first entry in his new blog, “Drive To Five.”

“I’d met one person at Honda through an S2000 event at the [Torrance, California] headquarters. As soon as I started the blog, I emailed him, saying ‘Here’s the link, in case you guys have any interest in following along,'” Tyson recalls. “Well, it got spread around, and it wasn’t two months later that an individual from Acura’s agency contacted me and said, ‘We love what you’re doing — how do you feel about rolling 500,000 on a red carpet out here?’ I said, ‘You bet!’

“We picked a date, and the hard part was that I had to target that with my miles, so I couldn’t go over,” he continues. “I knew it was 400 miles from my home in Phoenix to L.A., so I basically parked the car at 499,600, before the event, and then drove out there. Unfortunately, I’d overcompensated on my buffer, and had to loop around the block a bunch of times to make up three miles when I got there. I had a camera guy with me, and we were hauling butt because there were all these people waiting on the red carpet for me to arrive. In the end, the timing was great, and it was perfect: I pulled on there at 500,000.1, and was totally blown away at what they’d put together for me.”

Acura gave Tyson a new ILX 2.4 (six-speed manual, natch!) to drive and blog about, shortly after the Legend reached its half-millionth mile, and that four-door has taken over the daily driving duties that the Coupe once had; it’s not living a life of leisure, though, as the Legend is still in the rotation of Tyson’s fleet, which includes another six-speed ’94 Legend — a rare GS sedan in Desert Mist Metallic over taupe that he’s put a mere 12,000 miles on in six years — and a beautiful red 1992 NSX, which was his 30th birthday present to himself.

We asked this accidental brand ambassador for his thoughts on running a car to many hundreds of thousands of miles, and he replied:

“I’ve tried to go the extra mile with maintenance, and you reach a point with a car where you ask if it’s worth replacing every little thing, because if I did that, I could justify changing every nut and bolt. No way,” he chuckles. “Use your senses. Listen to your car, look at your car, smell your car. If you’ve been behind the wheel of a vehicle as long as I have with that car… if it makes one squeak that I don’t recognize, I can tell. It’s almost like your car knows you and you know your car. Starting a long life – we’re looking at the Irv Gordons of the world — you have to develop that relationship with your car. I would encourage anybody to stick to OEM parts, and don’t cut corners. I remember one time I skimped on an upper control arm, and it made the worst racket when I got going down the road again. I promptly had it swapped out for a factory part, and have had no issues since. I learned my lesson the hard way!

“I don’t think that everyone has to spend on dealer maintenance like I did over the years — I think that those who are mechanically inclined could and should do their own. In my case, it made more sense to pay to have someone I trusted do it. It’s also been fun to have the records; if I need to reference something — like I’ve done X-number of brakes — I can pull all kinds of stats from that spread sheet. I can even get down to the nitty-gritty about cost-per-mile to drive it. That was my analysis from the get-go: As soon as this car gets more expensive to maintain than a new-car payment would be, that’s where I’ll draw the line and let it go. But it never got there. Even with some of the big-ticket items, it leveled out — I’ve always been better off to not have a car payment, to keep driving that one.”

So how has it felt to have his Acura Legend Coupe LS become a celebrity of sorts? Tyson smiles and says, “I think it’s cool to have a mainstream Honda be featured in this light because it shows you how the collector car world is evolving — it doesn’t have to be a muscle car to have a noteworthy story, it can be anything.”

We know that some of the Hemmings Nation has had experience with Acura cars in the past, and the automaker wants to hear your stories: Acura has created a 25th Anniversary website to celebrate the milestone, and to share tales of ownership. If you have a story about a vintage Legend, Integra, NSX or any other Acura, why not share it with the faithful?

So last week we proved that significance does not equate to collectibility or desirability, as our commenters soundly turned down the candidacy of the 1986 Hyundai Excel for the Class of 1986, despite the fact that it opened up the American market to Korean cars. So for this week’s Class of 1986 candidate, let’s consider the similarly significant 1986 Acura Legend and 1986 Acura Integra. Like the presence of Korean cars on the road nowadays, we’re equally casual today to the concept of luxury Japanese brands, but that entire segment didn’t exist until the 1986 introduction of Honda’s Acura division. In response, Toyota’s Lexus division and Nissan’s Infiniti division both launched three years later, and Mazda’s proposed challenger, the Amati division, never launched at all. Before Acura, Japanese cars were regarded in the United States simply as econoboxes, nothing more.

The result of a joint venture with Rover in which both companies envisioned the United States as the target market, the Legend initially came here as a four-door sedan, powered by a 151hp 2.5L DOHC 24-valve V-6. The Integra, meanwhile, was based on the existing Honda Civic platform and debuted in both three-door and five-door hatchback versions, powered by a 113hp 1.6L DOHC 16-valve four-cylinder engine. While the previously mentioned Excel debuted to strong numbers, the Acura division sold just shy of 53,000 cars its first year in the United States. Yet while Hyundai sales plummeted over the next few years as customers ran into quality issues, Acura sales more than doubled in 1987 and then continued to rise through the first generations of both the Legend and Integra.

So now that the first Acuras are a quarter-century old, are we ready to consider them collectible? Or, as we’ve been posing the question the last few weeks: Would you make room in your garage dedicated to vehicles from 1986 for either the 1986 Acura Legend or the 1986 Acura Integra? And why?